TEDxMidTownNY Event Slated for March 8th

TEDxMidTownNY Event Slated for March 8th

by Space Frontier Press on February 22, 2011

New York, N.Y. -TEDxMidTownNY speaker and discussion series has settled into the newly renovated Hotel Beacon NYC on Broadway at 75th St., New York, NY. Each TEDxMidTownNY program features 2 live speakers, 2 video presentations from TED.com, discussions, and networking.

On Tuesday, March 8, 2011, the TEDxMidTownNY headline speaker will be Tom Shelley, Vice President of Space Adventures, Ltd., the only company providing human space missions to the world marketplace. He will provide an “Overview of the Human Spaceflight Training Market.” Tom will share his insights and discuss developments in commercial space transportation and other related industries.

Space Adventures, the company that flew the world’s first private space explorers, is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs available today such as spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts. The company’s advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott, and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.

The second speaker for this event will be Noah Zerkin, Research Engineer in the Neurology Department at the Human Aerospace Lab at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Noah designs and fabricates prototype sensor modules for automated mobile neurovestibular evaluation of human subjects who have spent extended periods in microgravity (i.e. at the International Space Station). He captures and analyzes data from human subjects using research-grade motion capture equipment. Noah has implemented a full-motion flight and driving simulator system for experimentation, and has validated a vestibular stimulation device used to induce a state analagous to that caused by prolonged exposure to microgravity. He is building a data-rich neurophysiological research and evaluation environment supporting the implementation of compact and inexpensive devices for mobile self-evaluation.

Noah is also the inventor and developer of the Zerkin Glove, a low cost glove for interacting with virtual objects in an augmented environment, and the author of Augmentation featuring his views on the coming AR revolution.

TEDxMidTownNY takes place about 6 times a year at the Hotel Beacon NYC and is sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF). The SFF is dedicated to encouraging the exploration and settlement of the space frontier. We invite the public to experience this work through our speaker series, workshops, and the annual NewSpace Conference.

Reservations are encouraged. Advance tickets are available at Brownpapertickets.com. Tickets go on sale at the door beginning at 6:00 pm the evening of the event. Tickets are $20 for general admission and $5 for students with valid I.D. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conference invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes. Their talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The annual TED Conference takes place in Long Beach, California, with simulcast in Palm Springs; TEDGlobal is held each year in Oxford, UK. TED’s media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily, and the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide. TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action; TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world; and the TEDFellows program, helping world-changing innovators from around the globe to become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities.